The poem that opens with Dunbar observing quietly from the back of the theater, closes with unobserved death coming for Dunbar, like the most captious of critics, rendering that first draft of literary history.

I know I love in vain, strive against hope; Yet in this captious and untenable sieve I still pour in the waters of my love And lack not to lose still then give pity To her whose state is such that cannot choose But lend and give where she is sure to lose, That seeks to find not that her search implies, But riddle-like lives sweetly where she dies.

Nevertheless, the Commission concluded that while the difficult circumstances had put people 'in a mood to be captious and fault-finding,' they considered the complaints of the healthy detainees in particular to be 'frivolous,' with 'little foundation' and 'grossly exaggerated.

If there be a religion which teaches the adoration of and love of a God whose character it is to be captious and of high resentment, subject to wrath and anger, furious, revengeful, and revenging himself, when offended, on others than those who gave the offence; and if there be added to the character of this God a fraudulent disposition, encouraging deceit and treachery amongst men, favourable to a few, though for slight causes, and cruel to the rest, 'tis evident that such a religion as this being strongly enforced must of necessity raise even an approbation and respect towards the vices of this kind, and breed a suitable disposition, a capricious, partial, and revengeful, and deceitful temper.

The main charge of Buchanan's captious and hyperbolic critique was that Rossetti, as well as other fleshly poets like Swinburne and William Morris, endeavors, in a poor imitation of Charles Baudelaire's scandalous Fleurs du Mal, to startle and disgust the public by flaunting his puerile and self-indulgent sexuality in immoral verses which he knows will subsequently be reviewed favorably by a clique of friends and relatives.

And as the venemous spider wil sucke poison out of the most holesome herbe, and the industrious Bee can gather hony out of the most stinking weede: Euen so the discrete reader may take a happie example by the most lasciuious histories, although the captious and harebraind heads can neither be encoraged by the good, nor forewarned by the bad.

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